THE incident last week in which Prime Minister David Cameron was heckled by fabulously privileged public schoolboys neatly underscores this play’s central theme that if you want to instil hypocrisy in our future rulers then start the process early.

Eighty years may separate our downy-chinned, spotty zealots but the comical absurdity and irony of it all remain the same.

Today, it’s our £32,000-a-year little Lord Fauntleroys spouting about the so-called ‘bedroom tax’. Back in the far more troubled 1930s, the pre-occupation of pubescent minds seems to have centred on the desirability of Russian-style state socialism and the prospect of homo-erotic encounters once lights have gone out in the dorm.

There are some truly magnificent performances here, especially Will Attenborough’s portrayal of the young communist Judd, forever quoting passages from Das Kapital and Rob Callender as his friend Bennett, who much prefers boys to Marx.

Both are equally trapped in the Tudor-panelled prisons of their studies and also by their preferences. Judd is hostage to his ideology, while Bennett must endure a lifetime of seeking what was in those days the love that dare not speak its name.

The sub-text to Julian Mitchell’s play is that this was precisely the environment that incubated the treachery of the men who would so spectacularly betray their native land 20 years later at the height of the Cold War.

As history records, these would be Philby, Burgess, Maclean and ultimately the ghastly Anthony Blunt, keeper of the Queen’s pictures and traitor without equal… public schoolboys every one.

And what Mitchell achieves is to show us how the naïve and glib intellectualisations of a schoolboys’ common room could – and actually did - mutate into the treason of men who would go on to shamelessly bite the capitalistic hand that so richly fed them.

Julian Wadham also turns in a superb performance as Vaughan Cunningham, the ‘conchie’ schoolmaster who takes a shine to the equally predatory Bennett, indulging in what is presumably the 1930s equivalent of ‘grooming’.

Another Country is a thought-provoking piece and provides a tantalising glimpse of ancient institutions that may not have changed all that much over the passage of the years. It runs until Saturday, July 5.